The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Many cellular service providers, also referred to herein as “operators”, limit the amount of data a user's computer, such as a mobile phone, can use over the operators computer network for a particular amount of money during a particular period of time. For example, an operator may offer a data plan that allows a user to send or receive up to 4 gigabytes of data using the user's mobile phone over the operator's network for a particular 30 day period.
Unfortunately, a user may not have control over how their computer uses the data allocated to them by the user's purchased plan from an operator. For example, the user's computer may execute system processes or applications that run in the background and request or receive data over the operator's network without the user knowing. Even if the user knows an application is sending and receiving data over the operator's computer network, the user may not know how much data is consumed by one or more applications over the operator's computer network over a particular period of time.
A user may wish to limit the total amount of data consumed by the user's phone, over the operator's network, to the amount of data periodically allocated to the user by the user's data plan. Furthermore, a user may wish to allocate a particular amount of data, per period, to a particular application. For example, a user may wish to limit the amount of data that a media streaming application uses within a particular month.
An application provider may wish to encourage a user to use an application while the user's computer is connect to the Internet over an operator's computer network. For example, a business may deploy a mobile application for their employees to use on their personal mobile phones. However, an employee may try to limit use of the application on the employee's mobile phone because the employee does not know how much data the application has or will use over the employee's operator network, the employee cannot limit the amount of data used by the application, and the employee cannot find out how much the data the application has used over a particular period. Methods for monitoring and limiting data consumed by one or more applications on a client computer of one or more particular computer networks may be valuable.